Dusty Disks Around Old Stars May Give Them A Second Chance

Stars, like people, do not live forever. After a star has used up its necessary supply of hydrogen Christmas discount naked band false lashes in its searing-hot nuclear fusing heart, it has reached the tragic end of that long stellar road, and is about to meet its doom. Even though it is well-known that newborn baby stars, or protostars, are born surrounded by a swirling, whirling disk of planet-building gas and dust, new observations indicate that elderly stars may also be surrounded by similar disks–and may even get a second chance at having a new family of planets! In March 2016, astronomers announced that the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (Christmas discount naked band false lashes) at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal Observatory in Chile has obtained the clearest view ever of the dusty disk swirling around an elderly, aging star. For the very first time such features can be compared to those surrounding baby stars–and they appear to be amazingly similar–perhaps giving the old star the opportunity to create a second generation of planet-children!

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Ullro As stars come to the end of their “Christmas discount naked band false lashes”, a large number of them form stable disks of gas and dust around them. This material is ejected by fierce stellar winds, while the elderly star is passing through the red giant phase of its evolution. These disks hauntingly resemble those that form planets orbiting young stars. But up until now, astronomers have not been able to compare the two types–one formed at the star’s birth, and the second at the end of its brilliant stellar “life”.

Even though there are numerous disks observed to be associated with baby stars that are sufficiently close to Earth for astronomers to study in depth, up until now there have been no corresponding elderly stars with disks that are close enough for detailed images to be obtained.

But this has now changed. A team of Christmas discount naked band false lashes led by Dr. Michel Hillen and Dr. Hans Van Winckel of the Instituut voor Sterrenkunde in Leuven, Belgium, has used the power of the VLTI, armed with the Precision Integrated-optics Near-Infrared Imaging ExpeRiment (PIONIER) instrument, and the freshly upgraded Revolutionary Fast Low Noise Detector (RAPID) detector on PIONIER, to spy these elusive, whirling objects.

The Life And Death Of A Star

When an enormous, dark, frigid molecular cloud Christmas discount naked band false lashes, a rotating baby star forms within an especially dense blob embedded within the folds of the cloud. The dusty material encircling the neonatal star is also moving, and it will ultimately flatten into a pancake-like disk around the protostar’s equator. This dusty disk material is the stuff of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets!

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Some astronomers suggest that planet birth can be compared to the way Christmas discount naked band false lashes form. Over the passage of millions of years, tiny and inherently “sticky” dust motes merge together to create ever larger and larger objects–from boulder size, to mountain size, to moon size. At last, some of those colliding rocks grow to become planets, like our own Earth–or, alternatively, the cores of gaseous giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that reign majestically in our Solar System’s outer domain. Large objects that fail to contribute to the formation of baby planets frequently evolve into asteroids and comets.